The present invention relates to a method for bending and soldering corners of a folding printed-circuit board, more particularly to a bending and soldering method which may speed the production of folding printed-circuit boards while enhances the quality stability of the products and reduces the percentage of defective product.
Generally, the printed-circuit boards are in the form of flat sheet, allowing a plurality of electronic components to be assembled thereon. However, when there are too many circuits and components being soldered on a printed-circuit board, the area of the entire printed-circuit board becomes very large which is not suitable to those currently popular products, such as a notebook type computer which usually has very small dimensions.
There are folding printed-circuit boards specially developed to meet the requirements of various kinds of product of small dimensions. These folding printed-circuit boards are characterized by that the entire sheet of them can be folded into an oblong body such that the room occupied by the printed-circuit board in the product can be effectively reduced. However, there is an important problem involved in a folding printed-circuit board, that is, the circuits on two adjacent segments of the folding printed-circuit board must be connected again.
The most common method used in early stage to connect the circuits on two adjacent segments of a folding printed-circuit board is known as "Wire Soldering Method". Please refer to FIG. 1 in which a whole printed-circuit board 10 is folded along three precut lines 11, 12 and 13 to form an oblong body. The circuits on two adjacent segments, for example, segments 14 and 15, are connected by copper wires 16 two ends of which are separately connected to the relevant circuits on the segments 14, 15. The shortcomings of this method are as follows:
1. The soldering of copper wires 16 to the circuits is time-consuming that will inevitably increase the production cost of folding printed-circuit boards. PA1 2. The soldering of such copper wires is difficult and it is very easy for the operator of soldering to touch other circuits during soldering and therefore causes short circuit. PA1 3. Higher percentage of defective product is found after the products are housed with casing and tested, that means a lot of working time and half finished goods are wasted.
There is a soft printed-circuit board developed to cope with the drawbacks existed in the Wire Soldering Method. Tailored pieces of soft printed-circuit board can be pasted and soldered to connect circuits on two adjacent segments of a folding printed-circuit board. This method is time-saving and labour-saving, comparing with the Wire Soldering Method. However, it still takes about twenty minutes to complete the soldering of a normal folding printed-circuit board with this method. Another disadvantages of this method include: 1) the soft printed-circuit board is apt to break; and 2) the circuits tend to be of poor contact.